CANNES,
France (Reuters) -- A British documentary arguing U.S. neo-conservatives have
exaggerated the terror threat is set to rock the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday,
the way "Fahrenheit 9/11" stirred emotions here a year ago. At a screening late
on Friday ahead of its gala on Saturday, "The Power of Nightmares" by filmmaker
and senior BBC producer Adam Curtis kept an audience of journalists and film
buyers glued to their seats and taking notes for a full 2-1/2 hours. The
film, a non-competition entry, argues that the fear of terrorism has come to
pervade politics in the United States and Britain even though much of that angst
is based on carefully nurtured illusions. [To view this excellent film
free, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/powerofnightmares]

The Bush administration
periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland
Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising
the threat level, Ridge now says. Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday
that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate
the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.
Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his agency was responsible for
repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.

ONE of Hitler's top intelligence officers, who ordered the murders of more than
100 British secret agents in concentration camps, was spared execution as a
war criminal and selected to work for MI6. Newly opened papers contain startling
evidence that...British Intelligence "turned" Horst Kopkow, faked his death
and used him to fight the Cold War. The Atkins documents have been corroborated
by newly declassified secret papers in the British and American National Archives.
Britain has denied that it engaged in the dark arts used by the Americans, whose
employment of Nazis to catch Communists has been well-documented. British intelligence
sources pointed out that Kopkow was not in the league of "the butcher of Lyons",
a reference to Klaus Barbie, the most notorious war criminal employed by the
Americans. The Kopkow case is uniquely chilling because the MI6 men who spared
him were colleagues and "handlers" of his victims. Among those whose torture
and death he sanctioned were men and women of the SOE and MI6 agents.

Declassified US government documents show that a man suspected of
involvement in the bombing of a Cuban passenger plane worked for the CIA. Luis
Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born Venezuelan and anti-Castro dissident, was an agent
and informer. The papers also reveal that an FBI informer "all but admitted"
that Mr Posada was one of those behind the 1976 bombing that killed 73 people.
Mr Posada, who denies any involvement, is said to be seeking asylum in the US.
His lawyer says his client, thought to be in hiding in the Miami area, deserves
US protection because of his long years of service to the country. The
documents, released by George Washington University's National Security Archive,
show that Mr Posada, now in his 70s, was on the CIA payroll from the 1960s until
mid-1976. Mr Posada once boasted of being responsible for a series of bomb attacks
on Havana tourist spots in the 1990s.

British
scientists have developed an antigravity machine that can float heavy stones,
coins and lumps of metal in mid-air. Based around a powerful magnet, the device
levitates objects in a similar way to how a maglev train runs above its tracks.
The device exploits diamagnetism. Place non-magnetic objects inside a strong
enough magnetic field and they are forced to act like weak magnets themselves.
Generate a field that is stronger below and weaker above, and the resulting
upward magnetic force cancels out gravity. Scientists have used diamagnetism
to make wood, strawberries and, famously, a living frog fly. "That force
is strong enough to float things with a density similar to water, but not things
with the density of rocks."

LONDON
- Self-replicating robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction.
Scientists at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York have created
small robots that can build copies of themselves. Each robot consists
of several 4-inch (10-centimeter) cubes that have identical machinery,
electromagnets to attach and detach to each other and a computer program
for replication. The robots can bend and pick up and stack the cubes.
"Although the machines we have created are still simple compared with
biological self-reproduction, they demonstrate that mechanical self-reproduction
is possible and not unique to biology," Hod Lipson said in a report in
the science journal Nature on Wednesday.

"This
record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should
be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents. John Scarlett
summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was
tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to
be by massive military action. C reported on his recent talks in Washington.
There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as
inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified
by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN
route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record."

WASHINGTON (CNN)
-- Eighty-nine Democratic members of the U.S. Congress last week sent President
George W. Bush a letter asking for explanation of a secret British memo that
said "intelligence and facts were being fixed" to support the Iraq war in mid-2002.
The timing of the memo was well before the president brought the issue to Congress
for approval. The Times of London newspaper published the memo -- actually minutes
of a high-level meeting on Iraq held July 23, 2002 -- on May 1. British officials
did not dispute the document's authenticity.

Merck
& Co.'s longtime leader Raymond V. Gilmartin abruptly resigned yesterday
on the same day congressional investigators released a slew of documents detailing
how the company continued to aggressively promote its arthritis drug Vioxx
after it knew of potentially serious safety concerns. The documents...showed
that Merck directed its 3,000-person Vioxx sales force to avoid discussions
with doctors about the cardiovascular risks identified in a major clinical
trial of the drug in 2000. Sales representatives were told instead to rely
on a "Cardiovascular Card" that said Vioxx was protecting the heart rather
than potentially harming it. They were [also] trained how to smile, speak
and position themselves most effectively when talking with doctors, and were
exhorted to sell Vioxx and other Merck drugs using the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Vioxx was withdrawn from the market last
September after another clinical trial found that people who had taken the
drug for 18 months were five times more likely to have heart attacks and strokes
than those on a placebo. Merck was sharply criticized in a hearing into how
the company and the Food and Drug Administration had handled the safety concerns
surrounding Vioxx.

Where
are the autistic Amish? Here in Lancaster County, heart of Pennsylvania Dutch
country, there should be well over 100 with some form of the disorder. I have
come here to find them, but so far my mission has failed, and the very few
I have identified raise some very interesting questions about some widely held
views on autism. The Amish have a religious exemption from vaccination.
So far, there is evidence of only three, all of them children, the oldest age
9 or 10. Julia is one of them. She...is adopted from China. She had most of
her vaccines given to her in the United States before we got her. [Of the other
one definitely had a vaccine, and the other's vaccine status is unknown.]
The mainstream scientific consensus says autism is a complex genetic disorder,
one that has been around for millennia at roughly the same prevalence. That
prevalence is now considered to be 1 in every 166 children born in the United
States.